#Wic

[mimi-0007]

Bobby Seale and Huey P Newton. Black Panther Party

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Cecilia Nowell at The Guardian:

When Project 2025 began making headlines this summer, it was largely for the ways the conservative “wish list” of policies for a future Trump administration would restructure the entire federal bureaucracy, deepen abortion restrictions and eliminate the Department of Education.

But the document – a proposed mandate for the next Republican president authored by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank – also outlines steps that would radically transform food and farming, curtailing recent progress to address the excess of ultra-processed foods in the United States. Among those: weakening the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), ending policies that consider the effects of climate change – and eliminating the US dietary guidelines. “This is a deregulatory agenda,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition and food policy at New York University. “And what we know historically from deregulation is that it’s really bad for consumers, it’s bad for workers, it’s bad for the environment.”

Project 2025 proposes changes to the country’s food assistance programs, like Snap and the Women, Infants and Children supplemental nutrition program (Wic), that Nestle believes are intended to dismantle such programs. It also calls for ending support for school meals. But one of the most notable of its proposals is calling on the next Republican president to eliminate or reform the dietary guidelines. Those guidelines form the basis for all federal food policies, from school meals to Snap, Wic and other programs.

“There is no shortage of private-sector dietary advice for the public, and nutrition and dietary choices are best left to individuals to address their personal needs,” the document reads. The food industry has long pushed the idea that chronic, diet-related health conditions, like diabetes and obesity, are the result of individual choices – like not exercising enough. Today, nearly 42% of adults in the US are obese and about 12% have diabetes. But nutritionists emphasize that those conditions are not the result of a moral failing, but rather conditions caused by the ingredients and policies (like aggressively advertising to children) pushed by food companies. Nestle sees that as one of many pro-business policies outlined in Project 2025’s agricultural provisions that trusts companies to prioritize public health over profit. “There’s twice as many calories available in the food supply as the country needs on average. So the food industry is enormously competitive in selling calories,” she said. “Republicans want to deregulate, and give those food businesses every opportunity to make as much money as they possibly can, regardless of the effects on health and the environment.” Experts also fear the way Project 2025 could undermine the work being done by the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture to limit the flow of ultra-processed foods in the US food supply.

Today, ultra-processed foods make up 73% of the US food supply, according to Northeastern University, and provide the average US adult with more than 60% of their daily calories. While the science is still emerging, researchers are increasingly linking UPFs to a range of health conditions including diabetes, obesity, depression and certain cancers. At the FDA, work is currently under way to develop a front-of-package label that corporations would be required to print on the fronts of products indicating when an item is high in sugar, fats, sodium or calories (the exact label has not yet been made public). Although the label wouldn’t specifically indicate when a food is ultra-processed, it would likely apply to a high percentage of UPFs in the food system because many contain large quantities of those nutrients.

Warning to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and co. who are backing Donald Trump on the basis that he would clean up the food supply: Project 2025 calls for rollbacks that would limit the tools needed to fight against ultra-processed foods.

[kibadoglover45]

The First Three Tarot's Introductions

Been working on the comic script for the upcoming Demitri's Carnival comic that I plan on starting once Circus of Freaks is finally done! (Final chapter will be out this year just dont have a date yet) I am proud how the Tarots are shown with havin GREEN as the main color due to Hal's eyes. Always watching.

So did the first three we see, Hal's hands, Wic, and Francis. It was also a fun color study keeping it to different greens.

[nando161mando]

[bitchesgetriches]

How To Start at Rock Bottom: Welfare Programs and the Social Safety Net

Income inequality is a real thing. Let’s start there. We are not all starting on a level playing field. In fact, some are actually starting at rock bottom.

Whatever way you define rock bottom, it’s a shitty place to start when envisioning your financial future. And it’s a frightening reality for many Americans. Giving advice about how my fellow college-educated Millennials can get ahead in their careers, defeat their student loans, and buy homes is all well and good. But it’s utterly useless advice for someone with no education, no family support, and no job prospects to speak of. It’s useless to those drowning in medical debt or responsible for supporting a family on a minimum wage salary.

You can’t think about Step 1 when you’re currently at Step -37. Those living at rock bottom need to achieve a basic standard of survival before they can think about “getting ahead.”

Keep reading.

If you liked this article, join our Patreon!

[souridealist]

so I just recently learned about this but it turns out a lot of museums in the US offer free admission (at all times, not just on a special day) to everyone on SNAP/LINK/food stamps or on WIC! so if that's you, here's a link to check out whether there's anything fun in your area that you can do for free. There's a lot of different kinds of museum, too - art, history, science, specific cultural heritage places, "here's this fancy old house," children's museums, zoos and aquariums, a bunch of stuff.

[cyarsk52-20]

Like I said: If Black People aren’t the center, I’m not advocating.

Preach.

Speak for yourself but I wish the worst on them with trump in office I bet there will be no more Palestine Trump will give them a ceasefire after Israel wipes them off the map

We black folks worked on a damn plan for Palestine. Behind the scenes, we were busy, but I guess all work for nothing. I'm done! Y'all got it. We are clocking out!! For four years we’re minding our business and letting those who choose these bad decisions drown in a sea of their own folly while we black folks will mind our business.

[there-goes-trouble]

Okay in case you need help for any reason (USA)

If other forms of financial aid aren't coming through, try 211--one phone call can save you hours of headache while you're already in a tough spot:

Separately, while there are still public funds for it, you can be tested for COVID & FLU by a nurse from home in just abt every state:

Online resource for people who hate calling:

Food for Women Infants and Children:

Health & Human Services for medical help:

More medical help:

⬆️got a hospital bill for a procedure that you did not consent to expressly?⬆️

Help for homeowners about to lose their home (involves placing a lien on property):

This is for finding natal care related to living in a post-roe v. wade world:

There is so much pride in using resources our government might provide if you qualify because why shouldn't you get help? Tough spots happen, thats why these programs exist. & that's pretty cool.

[dutchjan]

June 10, 2024

[spacefacedtragedy]

ATTENTION US USERS

If you use ACP there are still ways to keep phone service!!

The FCC is still fighting for us, so don't give up yet. While you can't apply for new benefits, you can keep your service for sure until the end of May 2024, and switching over to, or getting equally approved for, Lifeline

Is super easy!!

Right now a lot of people are setting up booths. You can trust these people okay? They're paid by the government, people usually just like you on commission based to set people up on these phones. They'll give you a phone, usually it's cheap and has way too many apps on it, so I'd rec trying to get into Safelink and avoid Access if you can.

You can stay online, and stay active. Tell others!

[peggy-sue-reads-a-book]

“I do not believe that money makes people happy; poverty, however, can make you unhappy.”

— peg’s dad

👆 that up there. Please take all the nutrition and healthcare opportunities available to you, these are good things. For what it’s worth, there’s a delicious bag of food bank grapes in my fridge right now.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Pamela Herd and Don Moynihan at Can We Still Govern?

A pregnant woman in Texas nearly loses her life because the hospital doesn’t know whether the medical procedure to prevent rapid blood loss will qualify under the state’s vague ‘protect the life of the mother’ standard. A 13-year old rape victim in Mississippi is unable to access an abortion she is legally entitled to because exceptions to the state ban are too difficult to access. A single mother trying to use her food assistance benefits in Nebraska faces a wide array of restrictive food choices. She can buy a 12-ounce box of Cheerios, but not a 16-ounce box.  What do these people have in common? The answer is that both experience gendered burdens, i.e. coercive and controlling state actions that directly regulate gendered bodies, labor, and identity. Gendered administrative burdens are the administrative practices the state uses to enforce gender inequality—especially in regard to family.

Some argue that the state has not done enough to reinforce traditional family structures centered on marriage, with others decrying women for having fewer children as “demographic decadence”. Whatever one thinks of this diagnosis, it misses just how much gendered burdens coercively reinforce a specific type of family life, imposing more burdens and fewer choices on mothers who don’t fit into a kind of tradwife ideal, and generating racialized burdens in the process.

Everyone experiences administrative burdens in some ways. But women are more likely to experience them, in part, because of the gendered division of labor in families (which in practice means everything from dealing with the onerous safety net system for poorer women to the ‘cognitive labor’ of managing households). These types of burdens are growing, most obviously in the domain of reproductive care. The Dobbs decision repealing abortion protections reflects the influence of a White Christian Nationalism movement that embraces a greater willingness to use state power to enforce patriarchal ideals. The Alliance for Defending Freedom advocacy organization that coordinated the Dobbs case did so to “restore an understanding of marriage, the family and sexuality that reflects God’s creative order.”

Drawing on a new research paper that examines gendered burdens in different domains, we highlight how these burdens control women’s bodies and reproduction, via abortion policy, and their care labor, via social welfare policies. Such burdens are not disconnected, but reflective of how burdens are used as tools to regulate and control women, especially racially marginalized women, including whether they have children and the family structures in which they have them.

Controlling Reproduction: Abortion Bans and Burdens

When abortion was protected by the Roe decision in the United States, administrative burdens were a key strategy used by anti-abortion opponents in so-called TRAP laws to prevent women from accessing them, a classic form of ‘policymaking by other means.’ States successfully imposed a wide array of different costs that made it very difficult to get an abortion. The limited women’s ability to control their own bodies, to choose whether and under what conditions they become mothers. These burdens included learning costs, like requiring clinics to give women incorrect information about health risks associated with abortions, compliance costs, like waiting periods or medically unnecessary building requirements for abortion clinics that forced many to shut down, and psychological costs, which resulted from burdens like forcing women to have medically unnecessary vaginal ultrasounds. 

[...]

In states with new limits on abortion enabled by Dobbs, the resulting burdens have a broader scope than TRAP laws. Whereas in the pre-Dobbs era, burdens were targeted at women seeking abortions and abortion providers, now they are broadly applied to health care providers that follow standard medical procedures. Anyone who can become pregnant is newly vulnerable. Critical to the spread of gendered burdens, and their impact on women’s health, has been the criminalization of abortion, which can apply to both pregnant women and health care providers. Nearly 20% of pregnancies end in miscarriage. But health care for miscarriages has become enmeshed in abortion bans. Woman have to show that a miscarriage was not, in fact, an abortion. A key source of burden is the ambiguous standard of proof applied; state actors may or may not accept evidence presented to them. Michelle Greenup, arrested in Louisiana after going to an ER with bleeding and stomach pain, was charged with second degree murder and imprisoned after hospital staff suspected she had given birth. Her medical records ultimately showed that she was not more than 15 weeks pregnant (so it was a miscarriage), and that she had received an injection that likely led to that miscarriage. This cloud of suspicion has the most dire consequences for historically marginalized women. For example, among those charged under fetal homicide laws, present in 38 states, over half were Black women and 71% were low-income. Moreover, two-thirds of women charged were due to ‘risk’ of harm rather than actual harm, an even more ambiguous claim to disprove.

[...]

Controlling Care Labor: Social Welfare Policy

Women remain disproportionately responsible for children, even as their ability to choose whether or not to have them is weakening. Women are also left to manage much of the burdens in seeking social welfare policy supports. But women in married couple single earner households face fewer of them—and are less subject to bureaucratic coercive and controlling practices over their parenting.  The distribution of burdens in our social welfare benefit system makes it far easier to provide and care for children within married couple households. This is in no small part because the benefits to married couples carry far fewer burdens than those provided to single parents.  Let’s start with health insurance. Married women (and men) can access health insurance from their spouse’s employer. It’s a marital status benefit. And this insurance is subsidized by the federal government to the tune of $316 billion annually. Accessing the tax subsidy is so streamlined, many Americans don’t even realize they’re getting a benefit.

[...]

But unlike employer-based coverage, Medicaid comes with large burdens. Mostly mothers face lengthy eligibility forms, documentation, and the annual requirement to recertify, all of which enact huge costs. In the last year alone nearly 70 percent of those that lost their Medicaid coverage, almost 22 million people, did so due to ‘procedural’ reasons, like missing paperwork. Other kinds of policies that also support caregiving for children, from food stamps (the SNAP program) to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), all come with a wide array of burdens that affect access to the program—and ultimately the ability of largely women to care for their children outside of marriage. 

[...]

Social Security is the United States largest income support program, constituting almost one-fifth of the federal budget. It is also our least burdensome large social program (the government and employers keeps track of eligibility) and distinctly advantageous for trad wife (white) families. Eligibility for Social Security retirement and survivor benefits is tied to either employment or marital status. Over half of women receive benefits based on their marital status eligibility. To be eligible, one need never to have been employed, one needed only to have been married.

[...] In short, burdensome social policies make it harder for single women in poverty, disproportionately Black women, to receive support for their caregiving. The shift of the safety net supports to the tax system has reduced some of those burdens as long as long as single mothers engage in work, but their lot remains more onerous than for women in traditional family structures. Burdens are especially coercive and controlling over racially marginalized women’s caregiving. If burdens condition access to supports needed to raise a family, they also directly constrain caregiving rights, best highlighted by child protective services. These services are a sprawling network of state surveillance and control, focused on disproportionately poor and racially marginalized women. 

Pamela Herd and Don Moynihan collaborated on the Can We Still Govern? Substack on the topic of gendered burdens and how such burdens hurt womanhood in all aspects of life, ranging from abortion access to food assistance and caregiving.

Such gendered burdens hurt women who don't fit into the traditional nuclear family structure, especially low-income and single women, not to mention women of color.

[fenrislorsrai]

A newly published rule from the USDA, which is set to go into effect on Feb. 12, officially codifies several parts of the Access to Baby Formula Act of 2022.

The legislation, whose passage was led by Hayes in May of 2022 amid the national baby formula shortage, is designed to maintain continued formula access for families who participate in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, known as WIC.

“When the baby formula shortage began last year, many parents were left wondering how they would feed their children. For parents enrolled in WIC, there was an added pressure of having to purchase specific formula based on program requirements,” Hayes said in a press release announcing the codification.

According to Hayes’ office, formula purchased through WIC account for approximately 50% of all formula purchases in the country.

More than 6 million people in the U.S. participate in WIC, including 11,000 infants in Connecticut, according to estimates from USDA.

"I know first-hand how critical WIC is to families, but the shortage revealed how dangerous those limitations can be,” Hayes added. “My Access to Baby Formula Act and the new USDA rule, will help families in the face of crisis. This rule helps strengthen a program that has historically been associated with improved infant health outcomes and reduced infant mortality.”

Provisions in the Access to Baby Formula Act, “Waive requirements that can slow down the process to get formula back on the shelves, without sacrificing safety standards,” and “Strengthen coordination and information sharing between the Secretary of Agriculture and Secretary of Health and Human Services regarding any supply chain disruption, including supplemental food recalls,” according to Hayes’ office

It also grants waiver authority that allows states that contract through WIC to purchase supplies from non-contract manufacturers in response to “emergencies, disasters, and supply chain disruptions.”

[wyn-n-tonic]

friends who receive SNAP or WIC benefits:

Delivery won’t be interrupted for benefits like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — once known as “food stamps” — as well as the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC). Both programs have contingency funds, but if the shutdown lasts longer than 30 days, it could become difficult for the Department of Agriculture (USDA) to continue operations. WIC would shut down entirely a few days after the federal contingency fund runs out, according to the White House. SNAP delivery could last longer, but for how long will be up to the USDA. During the 34-day partial shutdown in 2018-2019, the USDA worked with state agencies to keep the program running for the entire duration.

[makingcontact]

Well Nourished: How Mutual Aid is Transforming Food Security for Single Moms in Ohio

Well Nourished: How Mutual Aid is Transforming Food Security for Single Moms in Ohio

  Federal food programs, like WIC, face big changes coming out of the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health. Meanwhile, a single moms collective in Ohio holds it down for the single pregnant and parenting people in their community. Motherful’s resource pantry serves their 325-strong membership out of a garage three times a week.  We talk to members and founders to learn what’s…

[jovianwishes]

Hetalia ocs: VOC & WIC